I see so many posts here from students who say that its been their dream to attend “Top U” since they were 9 years old. Where do these ideas come from? How does a 4th grader start to dream of Stanford or Princeton? Is it something they are picking up from their parents? From media? This last application cycle has shown how dangerous such fixations can be. Personally, I think we should be doing more to channel those dreams toward more constructive and achievable aims. Wanting to get a good education or a great career is fine. Wanting a specific college, or even specific category of college is probably a mistake.
I’d say it starts with family influence. My family supports all of the colleges and universities our family members have attended. If it’s not a family influence, maybe it’s an athletic bias.
I don’t think having a dream school is a problem at all - kids just need to be realistic about it and realize if they can’t get there for undergrad, there is always grad school.
Yeah, sometimes. I think it’s also the rankings that have a big impact as well.
College marketing. Vanderbilt even used the words “dream school” in a mailer sent to DS this year.
I would guess it’s usually due to either visiting frequently (often for example a parent’s alma mater), cheering for the football (or other sports) team or seeing it in a movie. Though picking on a top school (especially a large instate one) might be because they often hear relatives, friends and neighbors being congratulated for getting in.
I told my parents at the age of 8 that I had decided to go to Cambridge. It probably came as a bit of a shock since neither of them had gone to college and no one we knew had gone to Oxbridge either. I think my reason was that Cambridge had won the Boat Race for several years in a row, and it was a big deal in sports in the UK (one of the few sporting events covered live on TV at that time, not that anyone I knew had ever rowed at all). A bit of a bizarre reason to pick it in retrospect. Unfortunately when I got there Cambridge proceeded to lose the Boat Race almost every year.
I don’t think I ever felt it was a fixation, just something I assumed would happen (I was a somewhat odd kid). But I agree with you that I would caution against a similar sentiment today if my kids had expressed it.
@MrElonMusk We definitely have a line in the sand with regard to colleges we will or will not pay for and that has kept our kids focused. Having said that, the line was never at a T-30. Top 100 or solid regionals were all acceptable. I think chasing rankings is a huge problem - especially when a lot of the rankings prove to be tainted or arbitrary. No thank you to “status anxiety”.
@MrElonMusk Certainly rankings have that effect for high school kids, but eight year olds aren’t reading those lists. At least I hope they aren’t. I’m surprised by number of kids who say they have had this dream school since childhood. I don’t remember thinking about any specific colleges until it was time to search. Of course, that was 100 years ago.
@gallentjill I certainly didn’t but it seemed like many people in my HS had been looking at rankings for a very long time…
@gallentjill but 8 year olds are going to sporting events, and they are sporting college gear clothing from birth.
Great question. Wish I knew. But great question and great point.
@lastone03, yeah, but the Ivies & MIT are sports powers of any sort yet many kids list them as dream schools. Of course, it could be media influence:
- MIT tops for STEM in most of media.
- HYP tops in general in media.
- Columbia tops in NYC.
An explainer: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IvyLeagueForEveryone
Ivy League for everyone!
And NYU is a popular dream school around here because of New York.
Parents, IMO. Definitely parents.
Our kids certainly had preferred colleges but we put the kibosh on the whole idea of a Dream School.
^ Peers too. Especially in competitive schools/school districts/communities.
When my son was in 5th grade or so, he asked me if he got into MIT, could I afford it? I said, if he got in, I’d find a way.
I never mentioned MIT, nor did I know anything about FA at the time. I just didn’t want to hamper his dreams nor his work ethic.
It is everywhere in society now, in old or new movies - serious or silly ones…Legally Blonde, Pitch Perfect, Good Will Hunting, The Social Network, Rudy - television shows like Blackish, the Disney or Nickelodeon shows like Zoey 101 or even This is Us always have a “going to college” theme somewhere in them. Not that kids are watching all of these, but it permeates into the social fabric. Sport hero worship whether it is a local kid gone to the big time school or the parents are big fans of a certain school brings schools into their awareness. The internet, their phone - anywhere there are lists, news, or things like reddit. The stickers on the back window of their classmates cars.
I think there are kids that dream of major league/pro sports and kids that dream of the equivalent in academics so they figure out what those “teams” are.
Sure, in most cases it’s the parents, but in my experience, it’s also the K-12 schools. My kid’s principal in K-5 was constantly yammering on about USC at every darn assembly. He decorated the office and gave special attention to any kid wearing USC gear. Friendly rivalries between prestigious schools were often mentioned at school events, built into fundraisers, etc. The schools also had a “wear your college sweatshirt day” every year. I found it all really nauseating, but I was in the minority. We have to work HARD to get our kids to ignore the boosterism around them. Not always all the parents’ fault!
To @CADREAMIN’s point, it’s interesting to look at how many of these films have identifiable “dream” colleges portrayed in a generally flattering light. A lot of Harvard (Legally Blonde, The Social Network and going back further The Paper Chase and Love Story), occasional Princeton (A Beautiful Mind), MIT (Good Will Hunting), Berkeley (The Graduate), Cambridge (Chariots of Fire).
Maybe we need a new college ranking methodology based on appearances in feature films?
@PurpleTitan Thats a great little article. The same few colleges really do come up over and over as short hand in fiction. I just watched “the Office” with my daughter and it was hilarious how often one of the characters mentioned that he came from Cornell. Of course, it was meant as satire but it reflects the general trend.